Society

Recently I had a partially heated discussion with two of my roommates. I didn't have a specific point I was trying to make, rather I was hoping to dispel some of the misconceptions manifested in my cohorts. The discussion began because I commented on a story given to one of my roommates in an email. Here's the basic idea: At the request of his students, a professor implements a grading system where the scores are averaged and awarded to everyone. Test scores drop because the students who don't study demoralize those who do, and the story ends comparing this to Obama turning the country socialist. In hindsight I should never have had that conversation, because I realize my friends were not equipped with the proper mindset to accurately analyze this field. I realize this is my word alone, but I am adamant about this opinion. This post is more about some afterthoughts and refinements that were made as I reviewed my argument.

I don't know if I consider myself "socialist". Here's how I see it: You cannot rally around the flag of capitalism 100% and be a "true Christian" (I use this term loosely to describe empathetic people). Capitalism by default means that some people will be screwed no matter what. One of the ideals of socialism is to account and provide for those people, even if it means bringing the outrageously well-off people down a bit to do it.

Here I must bring up a point that was made in the discussion. I used the example of tribal societies to show the positive outcomes of socialistic ideals put into practice ("social context", an extremely important concept for this discussion, was a word I used many times, but that appeared to have been acknowledged exactly 0 times). The counter argument was that it was obviously terrible because so many of these societies were destroyed or absorbed by the agricultural societies (I had to explain to them this period of social history). I then brought up the fact that there were still societies like those that exist today, so therefore the society itself was fine in that regard, but that it was the world around them that changed. The reply: well that just shows that those societies are inferior to the agricultural societies. I don't know how I couldn't make this argument at the time as it is pathetically obvious. The great depression, one of the many economic dips inherent in a capitalist society, caused many people who were formerly possessors of what we consider the standards of living to drop below the poverty line, in many cases the absolute poverty line; so much so that not only was heavy government regulation necessary, but bread lines and other government handouts were necessary. Basically, people were suffering, not necessarily because their way of life was unsustainable (if you are to insist that capitalism is sustainable, and also assume that the majority of people at this time were not directly responsible for the over-speculation and other major contributors to the economic crisis), but because their social circumstances changed.

I'm short on time. There's one other idea I had. The example of the professor failing his class has a host of critical differences from American society, something which I don't have time to mention. But, as my brother pointed out recently, we have a tendency to mentally group people - you might use the categories of primary, secondary, and tertiary. Basically the farther away from primary people are, the less human they naturally register in our minds unless overridden by a higher though process. Example: Muslims vs. your family. Consciously you may recognize them all as humans and thus equal, but that is contrary to the natural reaction. So, I assume the professor's class must have been your average large class where people form their many personal social groups and consider everyone outside of them lesser. On the other hand, such a system would have worked marvelously in my Arabic class, because it was small enough and full of smart enough people to where we were all one close social group, and issues like a lack of desire to study could be addressed, which would be nearly impossible in larger groups due to the natural social grouping process exhibited by us humans.